The Great Wealth Transfer is coming, and wealth managers are missing it

I spotted a fascinating post from Stephany Kirkpatrick on LinkedIn that gets straight to the heart of one of the biggest opportunities and failures facing wealth management today.

It’s an important post by someone who is a successful founder and entrepreneur.

She founded Orum in 2019 which was acquired by Stripe in 2025 and has now started another venture called Pretty Smart Money whilst also being an advisor-in-residence at EY.

The reason her post caught my attention is that her mother is 76 and widowed, has a financial adviser and, according to Stephany, that adviser has not spoken to her in two decades. Meanwhile, Stephany already has her own adviser whom she knows and trusts, which means that when her mother's wealth eventually transfers, there is every likelihood that the money will leave with it.

As she observes, her mother's adviser has had twenty years to understand her financial life, build a relationship and establish trust with the next generation, but has failed to do so.

This matters because we keep talking about the Great Wealth Transfer as though it is about money moving between generations, when the more interesting question for banks and wealth managers is whether the relationships move with the money.

Cerulli Associates estimates that around $124 trillion of wealth will transfer in the United States through 2048, of which around $105 trillion will pass to heirs and $18 trillion to charities. Almost $100 trillion will originate with Baby Boomers and older generations, while more than half of the total transfer will come from high-net-worth and ultra-high-net-worth households that represent just 2% of American households. (Cerulli Associates)

That creates a huge market opportunity, but the interesting aspect of this transfer is that it does not move in a straight line from old people to young people.

A key point here is that many assume the wealth moves vertically through the generations, but an enormous amount moves horizontally between spouses.

Cerulli projects around $54 trillion of spousal transfers through 2048, with more than 95% going to women and almost $40 trillion moving into the hands of widowed women from the Baby Boomer and older generations. Younger women are then expected to receive another $47 trillion through intergenerational transfers.

In other words, the Great Wealth Transfer is as much about women as it is about generations, and that creates a rather uncomfortable question for an industry that has historically built most of its wealth relationships with men.

That issue emerges strongly in the comments underneath Kirkpatrick's post, where one contributor points out that the problem is not confined to children.

Advisers can become close to the husband while the wife remains somewhere around the edge of the relationship either insufficiently involved or, in the worst cases, excluded. When the husband dies, the wife inherits the assets and responsibility for a financial relationship she never owned at precisely the moment when she is grieving and dealing with the practical consequences of losing her partner. The commenter makes the point that financial planning cannot be treated as investment consulting alone but should be advanced planning and, above all, relationship management.

That observation goes to the centre of the missed opportunity because, if you spend thirty years managing a husband's money but never establish an independent relationship with his wife, have you managed the family wealth or have you just managed one person's portfolio?

The same applies when the money eventually passes to the children as another commenter, who had spent almost fifty years in wealth management, explained that by the time he retired he had clients who were already into their third generation. His approach was straightforward: it made sense for him to know the children and for the children to know him. Another contributor summarised the same philosophy rather more succinctly as knowing the next generation or losing the wealth.

Wealth managers have spent decades managing the person who owns the money today rather than building a relationship with the family that will own it tomorrow

They measure assets under management, wallet share, product penetration and customer lifetime value, but customer lifetime value becomes a strange measure when the customer's death results in the assets walking straight out of the door.

The industry needs to stop thinking only about customer lifetime value and start thinking about generational customer value, because the Great Wealth Transfer will expose the weakness in a relationship model that ends when the customer dies.

This does not mean assuming that the children will automatically become customers, nor should it, because inherited money does not create inherited loyalty. It means establishing relationships early enough that, when the ownership of the wealth changes, the next generation knows who you are, understands what you have done for the family and has a reason to consider continuing the relationship.

There is an important caveat to this argument, which also appears in the comments and deserves to be taken seriously. An adviser cannot assume that children should be involved in their parents' financial affairs. One commenter asks whether Kirkpatrick's mother has ever asked her adviser to speak with her daughter or vice versa, while another notes that some retirees specifically do not want their adult children involved because their money remains their business. In the UK in particular, as another adviser observes, bringing the wider family into financial planning remains the client's decision.

That does not undermine the argument so much as define how the opportunity should be approached.

The adviser should not telephone the children and announce that they are looking after the money they may inherit one day, but they can ask the client whether they would like their spouse or children involved, whether a family meeting would be useful, whether the next generation understands the estate plan and whether there are things the client would like their family to understand without disclosing information they want kept private. The relationship can then develop with permission rather than assumption.

There is another dimension that makes this more urgent, because the next generation may become involved in the finances long before an inheritance occurs. Adult children increasingly find themselves becoming a kind of family CFO as parents age, helping to locate accounts, organise documents, manage powers of attorney, monitor fraud risks and coordinate advisers. That process often begins because something has happened rather than because anyone planned it, which is precisely why starting the conversation earlier matters. (Kiplinger)

One of the LinkedIn comments makes the practical consequences of failing to do this particularly clear, describing families who lose a spouse or parent and discover that they do not even know where all of the assets are. That turns the Great Wealth Transfer into something more complicated than moving a portfolio from one owner to another, because families need to understand what exists, where it is held, who controls it, what happens when somebody dies and who has the authority to act.

This is where the current obsession with artificial intelligence in wealth management becomes interesting. The industry is spending enormous amounts of money on AI, personalisation, predictive analytics, next-best-action engines and intelligent financial assistants, but one of the most valuable next-best actions might be remarkably mundane: with the client's permission, get to know the family.

A genuinely intelligent wealth platform should understand that a 76-year-old widowed customer is not an isolated account holder but a member of a financial network involving children, grandchildren, beneficiaries, executors and advisers. It should be able to support the client in deciding who should know what, bring the appropriate people into the relationship when the client wishes, provide financial education to the next generation and create continuity before a bereavement or health crisis forces everyone to work it out under pressure.

This becomes even more important because the recipients of this wealth will not look like the people who created much of it. Cerulli expects Millennials eventually to inherit around $46 trillion, although Generation X represents the more immediate opportunity and is expected to inherit around $14 trillion over the next decade, twice the amount Millennials receive during that period.

Those customers will arrive with different expectations of technology, service, communication and investment, and recent industry analysis argues that digital fluency and personalised experiences will increasingly become baseline requirements rather than differentiators. (Living Group)

There is some justified scepticism around the headline numbers, as the CFA Institute points out that the $124 trillion figure can make the transfer sound more sudden and evenly distributed than it is. Wealth is heavily concentrated, the transfer will take place over decades, and debt, longevity, healthcare costs and other spending will reduce what eventually reaches many heirs. (CFA Institute) None of that changes the strategic problem for wealth managers, because the assets that do transfer will still move from one human relationship to another.

This is why Kirkpatrick's story struck me as far more important than a complaint about one financial adviser. It illustrates a structural problem in the way wealth management thinks about customers, because an industry that claims to manage wealth over the long term still has a tendency to define the relationship around the individual who controls the money today. The Great Wealth Transfer requires a different perspective in which wealth is viewed across families, spouses and generations, while respecting the privacy and independence of every individual involved.

We call it the Great Wealth Transfer because trillions of dollars are going to change hands, but the money is arguably the easy part because ownership can be transferred through wills, trusts, beneficiary designations and estate processes. The harder transfer is the one that does not happen automatically: the transfer of knowledge, relationships and trust from one generation to another.

That is where the missed opportunity lies. Wealth managers have spent decades asking how much money their customers have, how much of it they can manage and how long they can retain those assets, when the more valuable question may be who will control that wealth next and whether that person has any reason to trust them when they do.

Stephany Kirkpatrick's mother's adviser has apparently had twenty years to answer that question. The uncomfortable lesson for the rest of the wealth management industry is that the Great Wealth Transfer is already under way, which means that the time to build the next relationship is not when the inheritance arrives, but years before it does.

Stephany Kirkpatrick's original LinkedIn post and discussion